Blog Post

For over a decade, the most basic challenge every website owner has faced is the position of the website in SERP. In today’s competitive world, the SERP ranking determines the life or death of a website.

To ensure that the website retains (and enhances) its SERP position, website owners need to conduct regular WordPress SEO audit to ensure that the website continuously meets the quality (and quantity) benchmarks as set by search engines.

An SEO Audit gives direction to the website and provides a clear picture of where it stands in Google ranking. In addition, the audit process identifies the missing actions and activities that could improve the Google rankings of the website. In effect, the SEO audit report is a complete picture of the website’s health, speed and performance.

Here’s why you should conduct SEO audits for your websites on regular basis:

1. The Top Positions Matter ( a lot)

Search engines regularly change their algorithms to make the user experience better and more streamlined. To add to the confusion, 36% of the Google users click only the first results only. Thus, it is essential that you should ensure that your website never leaves the first page.

Here is a simple example to illustrate the idea:

In response to the query ‘How it feels to be outstanding’, Google generates approximately 14 million results. Out of these 14 million results, only 10 stands a pretty good chance to be clicked because they appear on the first page.

So the moment your website slides off the first page, all your hard work, time and money go down the drain. In this scenario, WordPress SEO audit is an invaluable tool in assessing the constantly changing factors that ensure that the website retains its position on the first page.

2. Outdated/Duplicate Content can Poison Your SERP Rankings

Are you noticing a steep decrease in visits to your website over the past few months? The culprit might be outdated content. The trail is easy to follow: outdated content turns off the visitors and the traffic starts to drop. The same goes for duplicate content.

When you search something on Google, the SERP include titles and descriptions. As per Google guidelines, a good title and description ensure that visitors click their way to your website.

Creating impressive content on regular basis is a mission in itself. The process goes through writing and editing cycles. According to one industry definition, good content has:
· K- Keyword Density and Correct placement.
· V- Validity of content.
· R- Relevant Keywords.

During the SEO audit, the content is evaluated on the KVR standard to ensure that it contributes fully to ensuring the position of the website in Google SERP.

3. Slow And Steady Not Always Win The Race

These days, it seems that customer expectations are on the rise but their level of patience level is at all-time low. 47% visitors expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less. Google has adopted this as a SERP ranking factor and thus page load speed is an essential factor that determines a website’s SERP rankings. Slow loading websites have high bounce rate which in turn affects ranking.

An SEO audit will dig out all reasons which make your site slow and proposes solutions for the problems. In general, the main reasons that contribute to a slow speed of a website are:

4. Know the Competitors’ Weaknesses

Experts encourage brands to be ‘unsheep’, i.e. not following the “sheep” of the industry. However, to be a success in the business world, you need to follow the herd to take advantage of the industry trends. The trick here is to move in the herd of sheep ‘smartly’.

Everyone on internet is competing to be best. In this fierce competition, you need to keep a close eye on the SEO methods and techniques employed by your competitors. This is another important dimension of SEO audit that helps you figure out the tactics employed by the competitors. Once you have the list, it is time to incorporate them in your SEO regime.

5. Higher the Organic Traffic, Healthier is the Website

SEO audit is an invaluable tool to analyze organic traffic of the website. According to the Google guidelines, organic traffic is perhaps, the single most important indicator of the health of a website. In many cases, all things being equal, SERP rankings are often determined by the volume of organic traffic.

SEO audit keeps a constant eye on the organic traffic of the website. It monitors all the channels and sources that contribute to the health of the website to make sure that you are aware of the shortcomings in your SEO strategy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What is a SEO site audit?

An SEO audit checks how SEO friendly a website is. It checks various SEO elements of a website like broken links, content, keyword density, content length and more.

Q2. What is included in an SEO audit?

ON-SITE SEO CHECKLIST

Titles are unique for each page?

Titles length is between 50 – 65 characters?

Description tag is between 150-160 characters?

URLS are SEO friendly?

H1 Headings for title?

Is the content updated?

Content length

Content optimized for featured snippets?

Internal linking

Site checked for broken links?

Page speed: Average time to load home page and other pages?

Is there a user sitemap (html) in the main menu?

WEB SITE CONTROL CHECKLIST

Is the web site registered on Google Webmaster tools?

Is the web site registered on Bing Webmaster tools?

Checked robots.txt?

Is there a valid XML Sitemap?

Is the web site registered with Google Analytics?

SOCIAL MEDIA CHECKLIST

Is there a Facebook business page?

Is there a Google+ business page?

Is there a twitter account?

Are social media profiles SEO optimized?

OFF-SITE SEO CHECKLIST

Number and type of inbound links?

Opportunities to acquire new links?

Competitor analysis

Q3. What is a web audit?

A web audit is a detailed analysis of a website to determine its performance and SEO. Various elements of a website are checked including speed, broken links, navigation, content and more.

Subscribe to Get The A FREE WordPress Ebook Right in Your Inbox

About Author

Varun Sharma is a Co-Founder at KVR WebTech Pvt. Ltd., one of the fastest growing SEO company in India. He analyses digital marketing strategies, trends, and practices emphasizing mobile, SEO, social media, and content marketing.

WPblog is a WordPress resource website that regularly publishes content covering WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, news and ecommerce. WPblog aims to educate WordPress users about the best WordPress products and best practices so that they can create amazing websites.